Eleanor’s head tipped up as the girl nodded, left the trolley, and hightailed it back into the bathroom. The same bathroom where I’d yanked Jinx from the bath, stuck my tongue down her throat, and come to the shit-scary idea that I wanted her more than just physically.
My lust hid something deeper.
Something that made me die a thousand deaths a second.
Our eyes caught as I stepped toward her. Her nipples pebbled, her skin puckered with goosebumps, and she shuddered in her binds. Her body welcomed me, but her eyes blazed silver fire, smouldering with ire.
Placing my hands into my pockets, I clutched the vial of elixir as I stopped before her. I demanded my fingers to remain inside the material and not to cup her swollen breasts. “Pleasant night?”
She bared her teeth like a feral cat, showing sharp canines and rage. “I didn’t think you’d show.”
“Disappointed?”
“No…relieved.”
I sucked in a breath. “Relieved?” A scowl pulled my brows low. “How so?”
“It means I can stop repeating all the things I want to say to you. A speech I’ve rehearsed while my feet bruised from the wire and my dignity was shredded thanks to peeing in a bucket.”
“So you didn’t find the cage inviting?” I cocked my head. “What a surprise.”
She sniffed with temper. “I have so many things to say. So many curses I want to deliver. I want to tell you that you’ll never put me back in that place…but I know there’s no point. You can, and you probably will.”
Her head tipped up as I stalked toward her. “You have control in that, you know. Obey, and you live in luxury. Disobey, and the cage becomes your new home.”
She stiffened. Her belly filled and flattened as she inhaled. Her nakedness caused my lust to swarm like a thousand wasps, hissing through my veins, filling me with venom to take. I hated that I’d done that to her. But I’d do it again if it meant I could protect myself from her.
This woman.
Christ.
“That cage…who did it belong to?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You say who, but don’t you mean what?”
She frowned, mulling over my point that all humans spoke of creatures as a thing and not a soul. “Did the animal have a name?”
My stomach clenched. “Of course.”
“Then my question still stands. Who lived in that cage?”
My heart shed off its heavy hive of lust in favour of a deadly pounding potion of interest. She continued to surprise me. And each surprise punctured my defences a little more.
Clearing my throat, I murmured, “Ace. A chimpanzee.”
“How long did he live in there?”
“Before I sent him into whatever afterlife there is for apes? Years. Decades.”
She blanched. All colour slid from her cheeks, faded from her chest, pooled by her feet. “Decades?” She shook her head, sending hair whispering over her perfect skin. “On that wire floor?” Tears coated her grey gaze, turning them into rain clouds. “God.”
I’d come here prepared to battle with her temper. To antagonise her into fury because having her hate me was the only way I could fool myself into thinking I didn’t want her. But I wasn’t prepared for her empathy. Or for the way her mind switched from her own uncomfortable night, translating that to the pain of the cage’s prior resident.
A poor monkey whose days included being injected with drugs, hair shaved, and chemicals applied to delicate skin, being placed into crushes so he couldn’t move while scientists dropped all manner of so-called miracle medicines into his eyes to see if he’d scream. No part of his body was his own. His ears, his mouth, his anus, his flesh. All of it had some role for testing.
I cleared my throat again, chasing away the chill under my suit.
Eleanor blinked back her grief, her shoulders no longer tense with fight but rolled with sadness. She actually laughed once. A single sound of mirthless misery. “You know…I actually thought I was coping pretty well with my new reality. I refused to talk to the traffickers because my silence put me above them. I lived through your sexual initiation. I set aside my embarrassment and faced Euphoria as best I could. I didn’t let a chance of escape pass me by even though I knew it was probably futile.”
Licking her lips, she added, “I even felt a bit of pride. Can you believe that? Pride that I hadn’t broken. That I stood up to you. That I